2 developers working on the same database (1 Viewer)

HI,

I wonder if anyone knows of a tool out there to help control the development of a database by more then one developer at the same time.

I am developing a database with a colleague and we are working on slightly different aspects. 2 copies of the file as we can't both design in the same one at the same time.

Although we are trying to keep notes about what we alter we are tending to miss bits.

I have found a tool for comparing databases from total access, but they havn't written the version for access 2007 yet, and it doesn't seem to be too imminent.

I really need to sort this out asap as we are gradually getting out of sync and potentially in a real mess.

How do others cope with this problem.

Thanks for you help

Sue.

It looks like Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe might do something like what you want...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181088(VS.80).aspx

However, some people don't like it:
http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/windev/sourcesafe.html

Thanks for that,

I'll have a look but bear in mind the downsides.

Any other thoughts, especially those with not quite so passionate objectors much appreciated.

Thanks

Sue

Not exactly what you asked for, but an ad hoc solution is to work on two different object at a time so you can always merge the object into the final solution without worrying about either being out of sync (except for the cases where those two object interact with each other).

Another thing, but I don't know if it's worth the effort is to write a routine that acts in similar to sharepoint/sourcesafe manually.

The way I would approach this is to create a new database which is just for the developer, then build a table with the structure:

ObjectID
ObjectName
FilePath
CheckedOut

then do a undocumented export of all objects, saving them as text files in a folder which the path is stored in that database. Then in your development database which has all copies of those object, you'd add a functionality (again, only for the developer) that will import in the object from that text file in the library database and set the flag to checked out. When you're done, save it back to the library and uncheck the flag. That way, you and other developer only have one master copy of the objects at all.

There's already code out there for the importing/exporting, so the part would be to automate the mass import/export, add functionality to import/export one object with a click of button as you & other developer work on it...